Guest Editorial: Risk Management at NASA and Its Applicability to the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

Guest editorial On initial consideration, one might reasonably ask: What can the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contribute to the oil and gas industry? About 3 years ago, a senior principal at Deloitte Advisory’s Energy & Resources Operational Risk Group reached out to NASA to better understand the safety culture at NASA with the intent of understanding how that culture might translate to oil and gas operations. Very quickly, the conversation expanded to the realm of risk management. Working with Deloitte, NASA came to appreciate the remarkable similarities between an offshore deepwater facility and the International Space Station. Both exist in extremely hostile environments. Both function in remote locations where movement of crew and supplies must be carefully choreographed. Both are extremely complex engineering structures where human reliability plays a critical role in mission success, and both have a deep commitment to personal and process safety. It also should be noted that both have dedicated teams—the onboard crew and the onshore support experts—that live by the mentality that “failure is not an option” because of the consequences to life and the environment should a catastrophic mishap occur. At NASA, we use qualitative techniques— such as fault trees, failure modes and effects analyses, hazard assessments, etc.—to understand risk based on statistics, experience, or possibilities that our engineers can anticipate. Similarly, upstream oil and gas exploration and production uses qualitative techniques—such as process safety methods, barrier analyses, bowtie charts, hazard identification, hazard and operability studies, etc.—to assess risk. At NASA, these qualitative approaches are augmented by a quantitative risk-assessment technique called probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) to uncover and mitigate low-probability sequences of events that can lead to high-consequence outcomes. Why PRA? The technique of PRA was developed by the nuclear power industry and initially published in mid-1975, though not widely publicized. However, the investigation of the Three Mile Island incident in 1979 revealed that the PRA had documented the sequence of low-probability events (both of hardware failures and human errors) that led to the high-consequence near-meltdown of the nuclear core. As a result, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has required a facility-specific PRA for every nuclear power plant in the United States.